What Happens When Your Vendor's Vendor Goes Down?

tallen003
Oct 22
3 min read

On October 20, millions of people worldwide got an unwelcome wake-up call about how fragile our digital world really is. Amazon Web Services (AWS) had a major outage in its US-East-1 region, and suddenly everything started breaking. Snapchat users couldn't send messages. Fortnite players got locked out. Duolingo streaks were in danger. Canva designers lost access to their projects. Even essential work tools like Slack, monday.com, and Zoom stopped working properly.

The real question isn't just "what happened?" It's "why did one problem take down so many different services?"

The Domino Effect Nobody Saw Coming

The AWS outage started around 3 a.m. ET and lasted several hours. The list of affected services was staggering. Beyond the apps everyone uses daily, it hit financial services like Venmo and Coinbase, streaming platforms like Disney+ and Prime Video, transportation apps, government websites, and even healthcare systems.

What caused all this chaos? Problems with AWS's DynamoDB database service and DNS resolution in a single data centre cluster in Northern Virginia. One region. One cloud provider. Thousands of broken services.

Your Supply Chain Is Bigger Than You Think

Here's the thing most companies don't realize. When you use Slack for team chat, Canva for graphics, or monday.com for managing projects, you're not just depending on those companies. You're also depending on whoever keeps their servers running. And you probably have no idea who that is.

These hidden layers of dependencies stay invisible until something breaks. Your favourite app might have perfect uptime stats, but if their cloud provider goes down, they're going down too. And so are you.

Why This Actually Matters

The AWS outage taught us three important lessons:

1. Everything's Connected (And That's a Problem)

AWS controls about 30% of the global cloud infrastructure market. That's huge. So, when AWS has a bad day, a huge chunk of the internet has a bad day. All those different services you carefully picked might actually be running on the exact same infrastructure without you knowing it.

2. Your Vendor Is Only as Reliable as Their Vendor

Most companies look at a vendor's uptime numbers when making decisions. But the October 20th outage proved that doesn't tell the whole story. Snapchat, Duolingo, and Roblox probably have great internal systems, but none of that mattered when their cloud provider went offline.

3. When Things Break, They Break Fast

This wasn't just about people missing their game time or language lessons. Delivery drivers couldn't get their routes. Financial transactions failed. Government services went dark. When your dependencies fail, your business operations can grind to a halt in minutes.

What You Can Actually Do About This

Understanding your supply chain dependencies isn't just a nice-to-have anymore. It's critical. So, what can you do:

Figure out your full dependency chain: Don't just look at your direct vendors. Ask them what cloud providers, CDNs, and other infrastructure they're using.
Spread your risk: True multi-cloud setups are complicated but at least understand where your risk is concentrated. If every critical tool you use runs on the same cloud provider, you've got a problem.
Have a backup plan: Assume things will break. What happens if Slack goes down? How will your team work if your project management tool disappears? Think through these scenarios now, not during an outage.
Ask the hard questions: Start including infrastructure dependencies in your vendor conversations. Make it part of how you evaluate new tools and services.

The Bottom Line

The AWS outage took down some of the world's most popular apps and showed us something important. In our connected digital world, everything depends on everything else. Your business tools work great until the infrastructure underneath them doesn't.

As more of our work moves to the cloud, you can't afford to ignore these dependency chains. Another outage will happen. It's not a question of if, but when. The real question is whether you'll be ready for it.

Your vendor's problem becomes your problem. Their dependency becomes your dependency. The sooner you map that out, the better prepared you'll be when things inevitably break again.